The evidence from Naia — the haplogroup D1 result from a morphologically distinctive early American — was a major contribution to moving the field toward this more complex understanding.

But it was a contribution, not a conclusion.

The Living Maya And The Ancient Americans

There is a temptation, in stories about ancient genetic discoveries and the founding of the Americas, to treat the living peoples of the region as the outcome of a scientific narrative — as the end product of a founding migration, a population history, a series of genomic events.

The Maya, the Nahua, the dozens of other Indigenous nations of Mesoamerica become, in this framing, the living evidence of ancient population genetics rather than peoples with their own histories, identities, and rights.